Monday, July 6, 2009

Those URL Shortners

So unless you have been living under a rock, you have probably heard about Twitter. And if you have used Twitter then you know all about url shorteners. Basically, long urls are simply hard to pass along. They tend to sometimes break in email, are harder to verbalize in a conversation, and they are difficult, or in some cases near impossible to remember. Url shortners solve this issue by, well, shortening the length of that long url .

The problem with this is that a link that used to be transparent is now opaque. As you may have guessed this has led to a huge proportion of shortened links acting as a disguise for spam and a slue of other bad things.

One way around this problem of obfuscation is the use of the AVG LinkScanner.This is a free tool from AVG. It scans the pages behind all the links you click or type into your browser. And then tells you in real-time whether a Web link you’re trying to click to contains malicious code. Pretty cool.

Its not the perfect solution I am sure. But I believe it's worth a second look.I'm sure there are several other tools. So feel free to share.